A vicious assault. A devastating accusation. Who should she trust, her husband or her best friend?

It was supposed to be the perfect reunion: six university friends together again after twenty years. Host Ali finally has the life she always wanted, a career she can be proud of and a wonderful family with her college boyfriend, now husband. But that night her best friend makes an accusation so shocking that nothing will ever be the same again.

When Karen staggers in from the garden, bleeding and traumatised, she claims that she has been assaulted by Ali’s husband, Mike. Ali must make a split-second decision: who should she believe? Her horrified husband, or her best friend? With Mike offering a very different version of events, Ali knows one of them is lying, but which? And why?

When the ensuing chaos forces her to re-examine the golden era the group shared at university, Ali realises there are darker memories too. Memories that have lain dormant for decades. Memories someone would kill to protect.

‘A knockout new talent you should read immediately.’ - Lee Child

‘One of the very best novels I’ve read in a long while... astonishing, powerful and immensely satisfying.’ - Peter James

‘Plenty of intrigue makes this a must read’ - Woman & Home

‘A great novel that happens to be a crime novel....A winner’ - Mark Lawson, Radio 4 Front Row

’McGowan’s pacy, direct style ensures that the twists come thick and fast.’ - The Irish Times

‘Taut plotting and assured writing’ - Good Housekeeping

’A gripping yarn you will be unable to put down’ - The Sun

TALKING POINTS

Should we keep the same friends all our lives?

What does modern friendship mean? Competitive friendship /frenemies

Envy and how it can ruin your life, especially between friends, and how it can be sparked off by social media posts, the pressure to have a perfect life

Being an outsider at an Oxbridge University - what it was like going to Oxford as a state-school pupil from Northern Ireland

What it’s like writing about sexual assault in the wake of Me Too – the responsibility to get it right

The beta marriage - so much pressure to ‘have it all’, is it good to have a ‘crash and burn’ marriage so that you can learn what you really want from life and love, and do it right next time?

Traditional gender roles – the benefits of being raised by a working mother and a father who did most of the childcare and housework (very unusual in rural Ireland in the 80s)

The joys of having platonic male friends – going to an all-girl convent school and then an old-fashioned university I didn’t have male friends until I was in my twenties. They now enrich my life in all sorts of ways

What’s it like to experience loneliness as a young person and the shame and stigma attached to this, and how to build a friendship group from scratch

The best way to be dumped – why ‘ghosting’ should be banned and why we should bring in a ‘dating charter’ for etiquette in these days of Tinder and online hook-ups

Is divorce contagious? – when I got divorced at the age of 31 I was the third in my close group of six friends to break up within less than a year

How illness helped me find my dream job

ABOUT CLAIRE MCGOWAN

Born in Northern Ireland in 1981, Claire McGowan studied in Oxford then lived overseas in France and China. She is the author of standalone thriller The Fall, and the Paula Maguire series, including The Lost, The Dead Ground, The Silent Dead, A Savage Hunger, Blood Tide, and The Killing House. The Paula Maguire series was optioned by the BBC in 2014. A ten-part radio drama written by Claire was broadcast on Radio 4 in early 2019, and as a screenwriter she was selected as the 2017/18 Nickelodeon International Writing Fellow.

Claire set up the Crime Thriller Writing MA at City University, London, and has also taught for the Arvon Foundation, Guardian Masterclasses and at many literary festivals.

As Eva Woods, she has published four women’s fiction novels, including the bestselling How To Be Happy.

Why would one of Silicon Valley's most powerful billionaires offer a British ghostwriter a million dollars to write the autobiography of one of Hollywood's biggest stars?

Only once he is living and working amongst the world's richest and most beautiful people does the ghost realise that there is way more than a publishing deal at stake. Everyone he meets seems to have a hidden agenda and someone is willing to kill to ensure that their plans work out. But what are those plans, who are the ultimate puppet-masters and how far are they willing to go?

What Lies Around Us takes us to a world where ghostwriters work with presidents, (James Patterson and Bill Clinton writing The President is Missing), and create presidents, (Tony Schwartz who ghosted The Art of the Deal , setting President Trump on the road to becoming the most famous name in the world).

This is the world of myth-makers, story-tellers and media manipulators – the people who really run the world and the ones who shape the global conversations.

Talking points

How exactly does it work when a rich and powerful man like Trump decides they want to write a book? Who shapes the message? How is the message sold?

Who is more likely to be telling the true stories today – ghostwriters, who are paid to create bestselling books, or journalists, who are paid to sell newspapers and create click-bait?

Why are books still such powerful media weapons, as illustrated by the multi-million selling political books of 2017 from authors like Michelle Obama, Bob Woodward and Michael Wolff?

How much power do ghostwriters and speech writers exert when telling the stories of political and business leaders and other celebrities?

Do traditional publishers add any value to a book? In this story every publisher in the world wants the book that the ghost is writing, but if the subject can afford to publish it themselves, why would they need a traditional publishing deal?

There is so much written about how hard it is to make a living as a writer, less about how much in demand ghostwriters are.

About Andrew Crofts

Andrew Crofts has published more than 100 books, including Confessions of a Ghostwriter, Freelance Writer’s Handbook and Ghostwriting, a dozen of which were Sunday Times bestsellers. Best-selling author, Robert Harris quoted Ghostwriting extensively in his novel The Ghost, later filmed by Roman Polanski with Ewan McGregor in the lead.

Travelling all over the world Andrew has worked with victims of enforced marriages in North Africa and the Middle East, sex workers in the Far East, orphans in war-torn areas like Croatia and dictatorships like Romania, victims of crimes and abused children everywhere. He has also worked with celebrities from the worlds of film, music, television and sport.

Andrew’s fiction includes the critically acclaimed Secrets of the Italian Gardener, in which the same ghostwriter finds himself dangerously enmeshed in the Arab Spring while ghosting for a Middle Eastern ruler.

He hides in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment. Each kill is calculated, planned and executed like clockwork.

Struggling to balance her personal and professional life, young DS Becca Vincent has landed the biggest case of her career—and she knows that it will make or break her. But she can’t catch the culprit alone. Together with facial recognition expert Joe Russell, she strives to get a lead on the elusive murderer, who is always one step ahead of them.

Time is not on their side. The body count is rising, and the attacks are striking closer and closer to home. Can Becca and Joe uncover the connection between the murders before the killer strikes the last name from his list?

Talking points

Her Last Move is the first book to use a Super Recogniser (a small branch of the Met manned by coppers who never forget a face) as a main character.

Joe Russell is a gay male detective, deliberately written in as non-cliched a way as possible –

not hiding his sexuality, married to another guy.

This is John’s fifth book and the first that hasn’t been written on a commuter train – he has now given up journalism to write full time.

John Marrs is the author of #1 bestsellers The One (soon to be made into a film with Urban Myth Films), The Good Samaritan (shortlisted for the Dead Good Reader Awards 2018), When You Disappeared, and Welcome to Wherever You Are. After working as a journalist for 25-years interviewing celebrities from the world of television, film and music for national newspapers and magazines, he is now a full-time writer.

Her Last Move is dedicated to John’s late father, Charlie, who was a police officer for 25 years.

Freddie Makin is a surveillance expert. He spies on his targets; he follows their every move; he never asks questions about who’s paying him and why. To Freddie it’s just a job – until someone is sent to kill him.

To Die in Vienna by Kevin Wignall

For a year he’s been watching a Chinese academic whose life seems almost suspiciously normal. But now that he’s on the run from whoever wants him dead, he knows he must have seen something incriminating. The only trouble is, he has no idea what. Is the CIA behind all this – or does it go higher than that? Do they know Freddie’s no stranger to undercover intelligence himself? And what about Marina Mikhailova, the academic’s mysterious chess partner – is she in danger too, or is she not to be trusted?

As he’s forced into a lethal game of cat-and-mouse across Vienna, Freddie knows one thing for sure: his only hope for survival is to find out what he’s seen and use it to his own advantage – before his pursuers find out the whole truth about him.

Kevin Wignall is a British writer, born in Brussels in 1967. He spent many years as an army child in different parts of Europe and went on to study politics and international relations at Lancaster University. He became a full-time writer after the publication of his first book, People Die (2001). His other novels are Among the Dead (2002); Who is Conrad Hirst? (2007), shortlisted for the Edgar Award and the Barry Award; Dark Flag (2010); Hunter’s Prayer (2015), which was made into a film directed by Jonathan Mostow and starring Sam Worthington and Odeya Rush; A Death in Sweden (2016); The Traitor’s Story (2016); and A Fragile Thing (2017).

Of the recent film deal Kevin said: "I was in the enviable but difficult position of having two great film offers for this project, but everyone at Focus Features and Nine Stories was so passionate about the book it was an easy decision in the end, not least because Jake Gyllenhaal is such a terrific actor."

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For more information about this book, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Nathan Stone was killed in action while serving as a covert CIA operative. Or so everyone thought. In reality he’s become a ghost, a black-ops asset with a new identity and controlled by a secret government organisation. The Commission has one aim: to hunt down and assassinate anti-establishment enemies of the state.

Its number-one target is Senator Brad Crichton, an ambitious politician with growing support. Stone is ready to take him out, but his plan is soon compromised when the Commission’s kill list is leaked to a journalist—whose own name is on the list too. And when the journalist tries to alert the senator, he is found dead in suspicious circumstances. Stone is closing in on Crichton, but must act swiftly to reach him before the truth does.

He knows that one wrong foot will put him in the firing line. But where national security is at stake, the hunter can quickly become the hunted.

About J. B. Turner

J. B. Turner is the author of the Jon Reznick series of conspiracy action thrillers (Hard Road, Hard Kill, Hard Wired, Hard Way, and Hard Fall), as well as the Deborah Jones political thrillers (Miami Requiem and Dark Waters). He loves music, from Beethoven to the Beatles, and watching good films, from Manhattan to The Deer Hunter. He has a keen interest in geopolitics. He lives in Fife, Scotland with his wife and two children.

The trail leads to Berlin and Venice, where the waters of the Venetian Lagoon will turn blood red...

A high-speed train from Milan draws into the station in Rome, and an horrific discovery in one carriage rocks the city. Preliminary investigations are put in the hands of Deputy Police Commissioner Colomba Caselli.

The police receive a message claiming responsibility for the act and announcing more murders to come, and they duly turn their attention to a small terrorist group of Islamic extremists. But investigator Dante Torre does not believe this angle. For him, this feels like a smokescreen concealing the actions of a killer who has a far more terrible motivation to continue.

Kill the Angel is multi-layered, complex, full of twists and turns and satisfyingly dark – one of those novels you just have to read late into the night.

About Sandrone Dazieri

Sandrone Dazieri is the bestselling author of eight novels and more than fifty screenplays. Kill the Angel is the second novel in a thrilling series featuring Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre, following the highly acclaimed Kill the Father.

On the surface, the victim was a popular, high-performing student. But as secret grudges against her emerge, so too does evidence that she was living a double life, working on explicit webcam sites for a seedy London ganglord. Everyone Fenchurch talks to knows a lot more than they’re willing to tell, and before long he’s making new enemies of his own—threatening to push him and his family past breaking point.

With too many suspects and not enough facts, Fenchurch knows his new superiors are just waiting for him to fail—they want him off the case, and off the force for good. His family is in more danger than ever before. So how deep is he willing to dig in order to unearth the truth?

About Ed James

Formerly an IT manager for a bank, Ed began writing on planes, trains and automobiles to fill his weekly commute to London. He now writes full-time and lives in the Scottish Borders, with his girlfriend and a menagerie of rescued animals.

In For The Kill is the fourth novel in his latest series, set on the gritty streets of East London and featuring DI Simon Fenchurch, a detective with little to lose. Kill with Kindness, the fifth in the series, is out in August 2018.

Ed’s self-published Scott Cullen series features a young Edinburgh detective constable investigating crimes from the bottom rung of the career ladder he’s desperate to climb. The first book, Ghost in the Machine, has been downloaded over 400,000 times, hitting both the Amazon UK & US top five.

Ed is currently writing a series of FBI thrillers set in Seattle, USA.

A friend from the past asks for private investigator Lee Arnold’s help in tracing his son. Fayyad al’Barri was last thought to be in Syria having embraced radical Islam, but a cryptic message has prompted his family to believe Fayyad has had a change of heart and is searching for a way back home. With fellow investigator Mumtaz Hakim’s help, they might be able to establish contact.

From the bright lights of the Western world, to shady boxing clubs and murky online jihadist recruitment, and while violence erupts close to home, Mumtaz and Lee are on an unknown path into the mind of a terrorist, journeying closer to danger than they ever imagined.

Part crime procedural, part thriller, part psychological mystery Bright Shiny Things is a page-turning read and a fascinating insight into radicalisation, ISIS and the East End of London.

Praise for the Hakim & Arnold series

‘A gutsy tale, well grounded in local colour’ The Times

‘Bleak, brutal and timely’ Financial Times

‘Compelling.’ The Sunday Telegraph

‘This series has brilliantly established itself and this latest is another masterpiece.’ Crimesquad

About Barbara Nadel

Born in the East End of London, Barbara Nadelhas a degree in psychologyand prior to becoming a full-time author she worked in psychiatric institutions and in the community with people experiencing mental health problems.

Barbara won the CWA Silver Dagger for Deadly Web, part of her Inspector Ikmen series. She is available for interviews, events and to write articles.

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Published in hardback by Simon & Schuster on 9 February 2017 at £12.99

Introducing an exciting new author, Sandrone Dazieri, with a brilliant, original and compelling debut thriller.

A bestseller throughout Europe

First in a planned series featuring Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre

Absolutely electrifying. Kill the Father is one of those rare treasures: a page-turning thriller—in every sense of the phrase—that is also brilliantly nuanced and rich with insight into the complex and compelling minds of those, good and bad, who inhabit its pages. This novel is the new definition of a one-sitting read.

— Jeffery Deaver

Two people, each shattered by their past, team to solve a series of killings and abductions...

‘The world is a curving wall of grey cement. The world has muffled sounds and echoes. The world is a circle two times the length of his out-stretched arms. The first thing the boy learned in that circular world were his new names. He has two. Son is the name he prefers. He has a right to it when he does the right things, when he obeys, when his thoughts are clear and quick. Otherwise, his name is Beast. When he’s called Beast, the boy is punished.’

When a woman is beheaded in a park outside Rome and her six-year-old son goes missing, the police unit assigned to the case sees an easy solution: they arrest the woman’s husband and await his confession. But the Chief of Rome’s Major Crimes unit doubts things are so simple. Secretly, he lures to the case two of Italy’s top analytical minds: Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli, a fierce, warrior-like detective still reeling from having survived a bloody catastrophe, and Dante Torre, a man who spent his childhood trapped inside a concrete silo. Fed through the gloved hand of a masked kidnapper who called himself “The Father,” Dante emerged from his ordeal with crippling claustrophobia but, also, with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and hyper-observant capacities.

All evidence suggests that the Father is back and active after being dormant for decades. Indeed, he has left tell-tale signs that signal he’s looking forward to a reunion with Dante. But when Columba and Dante begin following the ever-more-bizarre trail of clues, they grasp that what’s really going on is darker than they ever imagined.

SANDRONE DAZIERI is the bestselling author of more than fifty screenplays. Kill the Father, the first in a planned series featuring Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre, is his British debut.